Dead Procession |
Released on March 1, 2016 via Labyrinth Productions
Dead Procession’s Rituais e Mantras do Medo is a lonely wander through a doomy and depressive corner of the Portuguese underground. It’s another distinctive emanation from a scene that has been producing some striking tapes, from the powerful doom of Carma, to Agonia’s buzzing depressive black metal. Here things are far more down tempo, a crawl through grey, sluggish atmospheres.
First track ‘Mantra de Sombras’ has a slightly odd entrance, in that it sounds a bit like it starts after it’s already started, with a slight stutter or stumble into smattering drums and an empty church combination of airy organ and haunted moaning. It’s a short opener but its low tape hiss and slowness it sets the tone definitively for the whole recording. We continue in much the same vein, with the vocals becoming a tiny bit more animated on ‘Percorrendo os Caminhos da Noite’, before we meet a more intense atmosphere on the middle of the five tracks. Here the vocals call out wordlessly, mindlessly, hopelessly in a rising and falling chant, while a constant but wavering chug of sandpaper distortion rasps away, a corrosive chemical reaction instead of a riff. This layer of gritty slime is stepped up effectively to a rhythmic tidal motion in the following track, the longest at just under ten minutes. Finally, in ‘No Fundo dos Lagos Negros’, we’re led through the fog by a hollow keyboard drone towards an unceremonious ending, an abrupt stop rather than a conclusion.
The drums throughout seem careless and slack, certainly not technically precise, but undoubtedly a contributing factor to the sense of pervading despondency- in the last track, they’re actually quite fast in parts, but because they’re so haphazardly bashed it still feels slow, a clattering sound effect rather than a rhythmic beat. Similarly, the mournful vocals buried in the mix are evocative, but a little wavery when called upon for more upfront melodic parts: there’s no formal singing technique here, and some might find it a little disconcerting, but again, a slightly unnerving field of monochrome oddness seems to be the point. Combined with the ominous organ tones, the degraded distortion, and the quiet but ever-present magnetic cassette skrsshh, it adds up to a release which wanders through dreary landscapes but with a unique and coherent feel to the whole.
